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Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 4797
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, March 11, 2007 - 06:37 pm: | 
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…that Public Enemy was “a reverse crossover”.
From the Baltimore Sun
Public Enemy made music of biting truth
Critical Eye
By Rashod D. Ollison
Sun Pop Music Critic
March 11, 2007
You got it / What it takes / Go get it / Where you want it / Come get it / Get involved / 'Cause the brothers in the street / Are willing to work it out
- "Brothers Gonna Work It Out"
Back in the late '80s and the early half of the '90s, the music of Public Enemy was like a call to arms in the battle for black cultural relevancy and political empowerment. At the time, the group's lyrics pushed millions into Afrocentricity. Leather Africa medallions and "It's a Black Thang" T-shirts were proudly worn by kids from the South Bronx to my working-class neighborhood in southwest Little Rock, Ark.
All the while, the music of Public Enemy delivered biting social commentary and unyielding messages of communal upliftment. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Yo! Bum Rush the Show, PE's seminal debut. To commemorate it, the group, still fronted by the commanding baritone of figurehead Chuck D, is on a national tour, which stops at Rams Head Live on Tuesday.
"Public Enemy was a movement - music promoting something other than hip-hop," says Erik Parker, director of content at SOHH.com, a leading hip-hop Web site. "They used music as a weapon and an art. They came about when there was this black consciousness to hip-hop, but they gave it focus. They didn't romanticize Africa. They looked at where we were as black people in America."
With the ailing artistic state of hip-hop, there's no better time to reflect on, or perhaps engender a resurgence of, Public Enemy's revolutionary music.
In the past decade, the legacy of the Long Island group has been dwarfed by the Bamboozled-like images of gross materialism, violence and misogyny over-saturating mainstream hip-hop. But recent statistics show that the pop audience is growing tired of the vapidity: Sales for rap CDs for 2005-06 plummeted by 21 percent, and for the first time in 12 years, no rap album was among last year's top sellers.
"It's about having a balance, and we don't have that anymore," says Havelock Nelson, author of Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music & Hip-Hop Culture. "Public Enemy had a symbolic value. They advocated changing behaviors in the black community and being accountable, and we definitely need to hear more of those messages now."
The searing music of today's politically minded outfits, namely the Coup and Dead Prez, is seldom heard outside underground clubs. But 13 years after Public Enemy's last hit album, 1994's gold-selling Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age, the group remains the only rap act to garner crossover critical and commercial success with music whose lyrics boasted elements of black nationalism and stinging historical criticism.
But on its face, Public Enemy - whose best-known hits include 1989's "Fight the Power" and 1990's "911 is a Joke" - was an unlikely formula that shouldn't have worked: There was Chuck D (real name: Carlton Douglas Ridenhour), whose Mack truck-like voice barked angst-laced rhymes promoting black awareness and empowerment, counterbalanced by the bombastic, court jester-like ramblings of Flavor Flav (real name: William Drayton).
All of it was backed with loud sonic textures - a dazzling web of funk samples, free jazz riffs, even kettle whistles - courtesy of Public Enemy's famed production team, the Bomb Squad. And with the militant image of members decked out in fatigues, shades and berets, you had a group unlike anything in pop.
However, Public Enemy's targeted audience didn't immediately warm to such a look and sound.
"We weren't accepted initially by the rap world, because the production of the records was different and complex and the messages were too political," says music producer Bill Stephney, who oversaw 1987's Yo! Bum Rush the Show and Public Enemy's early marketing campaign. "We had to align ourselves with a lot of white punk college stations. Our biggest advocates in the beginning were the Beastie Boys, who promoted and played Public Enemy music wherever they went. So it was a reverse crossover."
Stephney, who was friends with Chuck D when they were students at Long Island's Adelphi University in the early '80s, says the idea for the group was an "extension of late-night socio-political discussions over White Castle cheeseburgers."
At the time, Stephney, Chuck D and their friend, Bomb Squad producer Hank Shocklee, all worked at the now-defunct student radio station WBAU-FM. They shared a love for politics and the hip-hop culture flowering in and around New York.
But the three saw a need for an alternative to the self-indulgent, happy-go-lucky vibe of '80s rap. So in 1986, when Stephney accepted a position at Def Jam Records, he brought Public Enemy to the label.
"We wanted to create a rap act that was like the Clash meets Run DMC, where the music dealt with politics that addressed what was going on with black people," Stephney says.
But as Yo! Bum Rush the Show sold gold and subsequent albums (1988's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 1990's Fear of a Black Planet and 1991's Apocalypse '91 ... The Enemy Strikes Back) went multi-platinum, it was clear that Public Enemy's message music reached well beyond black youth.
"I'm a white boy from the suburbs and I was hooked when I heard them," says filmmaker Robert Caruso, who directed the controversial Public Enemy video ANM in the 1990s. "Public Enemy was saying we had to evaluate authority. The stories were human drama and they resonated with me."
In addition to the straight-no-chaser politics of the lyrics, there was the unique sound of the music. The cacophony of squealing horn splices, looped drums and kinetic layers of noise was just as much rock as hip-hop. For better or worse, Public Enemy's sound would help lay the foundation for the rap-metal style that boomed in the '90s with such groups as Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine.
Public Enemy would usher in the sub-genre with "Bring the Noise," a hit 1991 collaboration with the metal band Anthrax. (The duet was actually a high-octane remake of PE's 1988 version.) But the signature approach that Public Enemy introduced on Yo! Bum Rush the Show remains unmatched.
"What bothers me is that people don't seem to know how great and intricate Public Enemy's music was and continues to be," says New York-based Stephney. "Nobody has made a sound like that since. I think the politics obscured the music."
And tastes changed. As Public Enemy peaked with its revolution-now music, the so-called gangsta scene from the West Coast, as exemplified by the music of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, gained national prominence.
Mainstream rap largely shifted from "checking the community" to glorifying black-on-black crime, drug abuse, promiscuity and excessive consumerism. Sadly, the tide hasn't turned. Nas, the respected, platinum-selling New York rapper, succinctly summed up his view of the culture in the title of his latest album: Hip-Hop Is Dead.
But Public Enemy still fights the good fight, so to speak, albeit quietly these days. The group's latest CD, the overlooked Rebirth of a Nation, came out last March on the Guerrilla Funk label, and it's a likable, if unspectacular, return to the dense approach of the glory days.
Chuck D is as sharp-tongued and relevant as he ever was. But Flavor Flav, his animated comic foil, has in recent years concentrated on his hit reality TV career. His controversial VH1 series, Flavor of Love, was derided by social activists for its objectification of black women and for what some called Flav's minstrel "cooning" act.
"You're only cooning if you're acting, and Flav isn't acting," says Stephney, who initially objected to Shocklee's idea of including the performer in Public Enemy. "That's who he is. In Public Enemy, he was like the sugar to Chuck D's medicine. He helped it all go down. The formula was well-planned, and it worked."
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/music/bal-ae.eye11mar11,0,7920883.stor y?coll=bal-artslife-music
Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun | Get Sun home delivery |
Yukio
Veteran Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1980
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 12, 2007 - 01:41 am: |
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hmmm....the tenor of being a 'reverse crossoever' annoys me. There has always been black listeners of PE from the start; the fact of the matter is, there is a larger population of whites, so numerically they are and have always been PE's main consumers. But this is on account of there being a larger white population than black.
This is the same case with jazz music. If black folks represent only 13% of the population of course they're not going to be the main consumers of hip hop, jazz, or any other form of mainstream black music...i'm alienated by this lapse in logical! |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 7736
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, March 12, 2007 - 11:35 am: |
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Well, I've frequently dismissed percentages when it comes to evaluating who does what, for the very reason you state, Yukio. But of course, black folks also use these misleading extrapolations to their advantage when dealing with social issues. Whatever the figures, however, I would still tend to believe that all things being equal, more whites than blacks are into jazz and blues nowadays. These genres have almost achieved cult status. |
Yukio
Veteran Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1981
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - 02:57 am: |
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but there is the implication that because one is black they are suppose to endorse something...also, there is the second implication that its zero sum game, so that black consumers of jazz, blues, etc....are alienated and unappreciated, especially those who have been listeners for many, many years...white folk and others always vampire our culture as a cult, anyways...look at the japanese and break dancing |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 8803
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - 03:03 am: |
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Yukio,
Japanese can BREAK DANCE? Who wouldah thunkit?? |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 7779
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - 11:50 am: |
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True, Yukio, but black jazz and blues afficionados are the main ones who lament that other blacks don't show enthusiasm for these genres which blacks originated. As a result, these forms are being co-opted by white artists. |
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